Tag Archive: Financial Disclosure

This week, the latest edition of the Trump, Inc. podcast takes a look at how President Donald Trump approaches taxes, Forbes takes a look at what the president’s financial disclosures include, what they don’t and why that’s a problem, and the Democrats talk about possible ethics reform.

This week, President Donald Trump files his financial disclosures, a Trump Organization construction partner struck a deal with a Chinese state-owned construction company to build a theme park next to planned Trump properties—just as the president publicly shared his mission to help bring jobs back to China, and a watchdog group filed an ethics complaint against President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

The U.S. is trying to monitor the kinds of transactions that contributed to the 2008 financial crash, and subsequent recession, but the effort has shot itself in the foot, all for lack of a data standard. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been tasked with oversight of credit default swaps, but their attempts to define a standard for reporting in this previously unmonitored market have not worked out as planned.

Congress has been delaying implementation of the STOCK Act, largely out of fear over what could happen if disclosures go online. A new report from the National Academy of Public Administration says those fears are well-founded. But its reasoning is flawed, and its recommendations -- which amount to security through obscurity -- are badly wrong-headed. If there are problems with the disclosures mandated by STOCK, let's fix them. Ignoring them and hoping that obscurity will prevent bad things from happening is not only short-sighted, it's dangerous.

Even before he was elected last November to represent Chicago's southern exurbs in the House, Illinois Democrat Bill Foster decided to sell his stake in Electronic Theatre Controls, a company he founded with his brother. Foster jettisoned the shares -- worth at least $5 million -- "to minimize potential conflicts of interest when voting on legislation that might impact his personal finances," according to his press secretary.

Among this year's congressional freshmen, Foster stands out as a noteworthy exception.

Now that President Barack Obama's inaugural festivities are over and the 113th Congress is getting down to serious business, Sunlight ...